“StorMagic’s SvSAN™ was the product that met all of our requirements in terms of functionality, performance, reliability and cost effectiveness”

Background

Founded in 1960, CreditPlus Bank is recognized through an online study as Germany's best special bank for instalment loans. CreditPlus belongs to the Crédit Agricole Group, which, with 54 million customers in 70 countries, is one of the largest banks in Europe. With more than 500 employees CreditPlus has reached a new business volume with consumer credits of more than 1 billion Euro in 2010. Customer service is of the highest importance to CreditPlus, which is why 97% of its customers are very satisfied or satisfied with it.

The Problem

As CreditPlus grew as a financial institution, so did its data storage requirements. Today, the computer network includes a large storage area network (SAN) with RAID 1 mirroring that supports 150 VMware virtual machines running in a 24/7 production environment. For business continuity and security reasons, the production environment runs in two datacenters, several miles apart, each consisting of 40+ terabytes of storage.

The SAN, which the bank acquired from a major storage provider and initially cost tens-of-thousands of dollars, was expensive to maintain and would soon require additional disk capacity in order to stay ahead of the bank's rapid growth in storage requirements.

CreditPlus consulted with its storage vendor and found that not only would the upgrade cost be high, the expansion would require the SAN to be taken offline for a period of time. Downtime was not an option for CreditPlus, so it was imperative that an interim solution be found.

The Solution

Stainczyk & Partners GmbH performed a trial installation of SvSAN at one of the bank's local branches. During the trial, CreditPlus soon realized that the features and benefits of SvSAN could be the interim solution it was looking for and decided to execute a proof of concept in a heavy I/O environment.

During the proof of concept CreditPlus conducted extensive testing of data integrity and high availability in the event of system failures under demanding I/O loads. As the proof of concept was successful, CreditPlus began calculating costs and comparing functionality against other solutions. In summary it came to the decision that StorMagic was the only choice. Torsten Kurz (CISO and Head of Team IT-Infrastructure and -Systems ) stated: “StorMagic’s SvSAN was the product which met all of our requirements in terms of functionality, performance, reliability and cost effectiveness. Migration to SvSAN for the entire production system was realized within 2 weeks without a second of downtime.”

The Result

Once the SvSAN was active in the production environment, CreditPlus observed a substantial difference in performance when compared to the Physical SAN, achieving a minimum increase in I/O’s of 25%.

CreditPlus recognized that as an interim solution SvSAN was out-performing its physical SAN on all ots applications and, as a result, CreditPlus concluded that SvSAN would remain as a permanent solution.